Scott Valley Hello

We'll work on driving first, waving later

Whenever my wife and I are driving in a city I always get asked the same question: "Why are you waving at everyone?"  It's a fair question, and I can only say that old habits are hard to break.  Here in Scott Valley, you are pretty much required to wave.  At everyone you see.  I even feel a sense of guilt when I get caught zoning out and I forget The Wave.

And, yes, Scott Valley has its own wave.  It's the peace sign, oddly enough, and I've been noticing lately that more and more people are using it as their wave.  Of course, there are the head nodder wavers, and the flappy-hand wavers, and the one-finger wavers (usually the pointer finger, but sometimes the middle), and the rock-and-roll devil horns wavers, but also, there are an awful lot of peace-sign wavers.  So many that I've officially named it the Scott Valley Hello.

Too cool to wave

Why a peace sign, you might ask.  It all started with my brother, Greg.  His buddy, Roger, works for the county, so we pass him on the road a lot.  When you see the same person on the same stretch of road for several days in a row, you start to get creative with your waving.  Greg started giving Roger the peace sign and Roger thought it was hilarious.  So he started giving it back.  I thought it was funny, so I started using the peace wave at every car I passed.  From there, it took on a life of its own.

 And that is the origin of the Scott Valley Hello.

Corral Humility

This oxbow can support a lot of weight

 We've been spending, off and on, the last few weeks deconstructing, rearranging, and rebuilding one of our sets of corrals.  We set new cedar posts, put up new lumber, hammered nails, poured concrete, welded oxbows, and rehung gates.  Things were looking pretty spiffy, I must say.  We had a few small projects left to make it perfect, but also had a herd of cattle that needed vaccinating, so we ran them through.  We figured it would be a good test of our progress.

I will tell you this: I was feeling pretty proud of the work we did.  We ran the cows through and discovered a few tweaks we'll need to make.  Not the 5 star rating I hoped for, but not surprising either.  Next, we ran the calves through and found a couple more even smaller fixes we'd need to make.  All in all, things were looking pretty good.

Then we ran the bulls through.  There were only 3, but all it took was 1.  He crashed through 8 fences in 2 days -- 5 of which were in our new, beautiful corrals.  It was a lesson in humility, for sure.  And, when we go back to fine-tune our set up (and replace the boards and gates the bull smashed), we might just set the whole damn thing in metal.